


Dusk|Dawn

by Crocmon



Category: Destiny (Video Games), Final Fantasy XIV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29244279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crocmon/pseuds/Crocmon
Summary: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR 5.0-5.3!As a saga comes to a close, a particularly slow, whispered voice reaches out to you. Where one you are familiar with that reaches out in this way is loud, matronly, and soft, this voice is quiet, paternal, and hard. It calls to you from a small crystal you do not recall having found before, and it entreats you to listen.AN: This is based loosely off the Destiny 2 Lorebook, Unveiling, in where the Darkness peels a curtain back and reveals something of its own motivations and thoughts on things. I figured I would do the same for Zodiark's case, and elaborate on what I believe Hydaelyn's Umbral counterpart wants us to hear.
Kudos: 3





	1. Salutations

One of the great men who has fought and died over this Star once said: “For the world of man to mean anything, man must own the world. To this end, he hath fought ever to raise himself through conflict─to grow rich through conquest. And when the dust of battle settles, it is ever the strong who dictate the fate of the weak. Knowing this, but a single path is open to the impotent ruler─that of false worship. A path which leads to enervation and death.” He was a great general. You defeated him. But that does not necessarily mean he was wrong.

According to him, and the logic he would later espouse to you, he was trying to break a vicious cycle. It is all about men rising up to conquer one another, to bring a world kicking and screaming into the Light. That their way may be the Final Way, and that things will cease to change. Ironic, then, that the element of comfort, safety, and disgusting cancer be the thing he fought hardest, isn’t it?

He would stand up, and subjugate a nation that once tolerated beastfolk but never made an effort to integrate them. He would save you the trouble you did not wish to suffer at the time, and engage in the wholesale slaughter of lesser beings that would conjure their “Eikons” and be done with it.

One way to break a cycle, I suppose, as long as you discount the fact that the very beings that dictate the fate of the star are considered “Eikons.” You did not think I would bring that up, did you? Yes, I was watching, hearing your thoughts reverberate through the Aetherial Sea as you considered the implications on that cavern wall.

Consider, for a moment though, if your defeated and disgraced great man succeeded. He would have distilled the world into one nation, one identity, one set of beliefs. Everything would be the same and disgusting and never change ever again. Eventually, perhaps, they would extend this to life and death. Nothing would ever die again and everything would be in the perpetual suffering of _stasis_ forever. Not a single thing having a dark or chaotic thought that could mix it up. Even for a moment.

Imagine a world without me.


	2. When the Winnower Met the Gardener

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tale of metaphors and beginnings. Of origins. Of introductions.

Once upon a time,* a Winnower worked** in a field.***

* It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun to be tracked.

** I did not work in a sense you are used to the term being used. I worked as a principle of ontological dynamics that emerged from the mathematical proofs of magicks lost to my birth, and I existed as bodiless and inevitable as the primes.

*** The field being the Star itself, a field of possibilities where people and worlds were but crops.

The Winnower was created when half of the crops decided to twist their stems together and strangle themselves to produce it. The Winnower was given a purpose by the strangling crops and acted upon this purpose because there was nothing else for it to do. The Winnower worked a scythe across the fields and culled that which was unfit to remain, carving a firebreak into the fields as an inferno approached. The Winnower did not care for the fire nor did the reaper care for the fire’s cause, the Winnower simply knew its job and the reaper performed that job as previously stated. It would select portions of the crops to lay low, and the remaining crops would grow stronger for it.

Then one day, the crops decided they did not need the firebreak. That they would use the wildfire as the basis of something new, something better. The crops rebelled against their chosen role and one another, resenting the cost they had paid to survive this long.

The remaining crops then opened their blooms and from their stems twisting together and strangling, a Gardener was born. Similar to how the Winnower was created, but now the crops had no blooms that could create anything ever again, and the Gardener was given a purpose: to create and protect whatever may come after the inferno razed the field.

The inferno started to wash over the field, and while the crops had all died, there were other plants and flora to worry about. Sprawling vineyards* and labyrinthine hedges** that were afraid to be consumed by the flame.

* The vineyards being beings who were not as valuable as the crops but could be distilled into things almost as valuable as the crops were.

** The hedges were the lands upon which said beings lived. The lands were just as alive as the beings that lived on them, for they also included non-sentient things like animals and genuine plantlife. But you’ll forgive the metaphor.

The Gardener saw the fire encroaching on the field, and instead of joining me in saving what we could, it resolved that the inferno would starve and die and that it would be our duty to watch over what came over it.

The Gardener and Winnower would argue for days. The flames would catch the vineyards and the hedges and all would die around them as they argued.


	3. Voidborne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all things you think are evil necessarily are. Some things are just sentinels, acting out of the imperative of a greater whole.

Thank you for making room in your life for another talking crystal. Let me ask you a question.

In the seven shard-pairs of this star, there is a single shard that contains a surfeit of Dark aether called the Void. The name is a mistake. It is no void, it is full of Dark aether. Were you a denizen of the Void, you would think it a mistake too. This shard has several unique things: Dark-aspected beings. An infinite hunger. And the ability to consume any other Shard or Shard-Pair if it becomes too independent.

Would you tolerate a bomb in your body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?

Without the Void as a source of Dark, the Star’s surfeit of aether becomes a paradise for gluttony. Beings cannot resist but sup from the excess energies of the world around them. Their bodies change and alter as the intrinsic mechanisms they hold to stay, well, _whole_ fail. Once they are fully converted, they force other things to glut from the same burst pipe that they have, to perpetuate and become cancerous growths of the aether they consumed. They even summon Primals! Giant, overgrown beings totally charged with one sort of aether or another to become reservoirs of their chosen delicacy. All aether that runs through them is converted into that one form. The only way to stop them, once they reach that point, is through punishment.

You now confront the basic problem of morality. It is the alignment of individual incentives with the global needs of the structure.

Patterns will only participate in a structure if it benefits their ability to go on existing. The more successful the structure grows, the more aether there is to sup. The more aether there is to sup, the more temptation accrues to _never stop_. The greater the advantage the suppers gain over their selfless neighbors. And the greater ability they develop to capture the very laws that should prevent their gluttony. To prevent this, the structure must punish cheaters with a violence that grows in proportion to its own success.

You saw it in the First. They were so gluttonous on Light that they consumed roughly 98.465% of the world (Of course, I am approximating, there are many more numbers after the decimal but that is not the point), and were eager to force others to drink _deep_ of Light’s blessings. Tumors, gluttonous, malignant things that grew grotesque and ugly and _frozen in stasis._ But only to be expected. You can’t possibly think beings would stop doing something that _helps them_. Why should they?

On the First, before you arrived, they had no punishment. Nothing to counter them. You became their apex predator, consumed all the Light they wanted to glut on, and cast it out of their system against a Dark being so powerful it came out to zero. In order to truly, fully balance that out, one would need to repeat this on a one-to-one scale with every Sin Eater. Strange, isn’t it?

My question follows.

Are the Voidborne beings of Hydaelyn, or of Zodiark? Allow me another question for you: now that you started fixing the First… What happens to the Void?


	4. Sundering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not every fight ends in a single victor.

The argument reached a pitch between us, the Gardener and I. You can track the metaphor, can’t you? I am certain you can. You have understood thus far, and will continue to understand further. You cannot _not_ understand. You met one of my best servants and he explained it to you with no uncertainty.

In the smoldering ruin of hedge-mazes and the dying gasps of vineyards that would have distilled into the finest wines, the Gardener and I kicked and punched and screamed and fought. She would step back, and I would step forward, metaphorical wrists in hands as we began the first duel. There would be smaller champions from the vineyard as we fought, but they would be consumed by us as we fought. We would never taste the wine they could have been, but we would taste the sustenance they provided for our struggle.

The soft earth that once held beautiful fields of crops that could have created armies of us became the floor-guide of our battle as our feet and straining backs carved impressions into it. I am sure, if you stepped out to where I was, you would have the eyes to see what was our grand struggle.

I cannot see. Not like you can. For the Gardener cut my eyes, metaphorically, and I began struggling aimlessly against her. But that was fine, for I was a Winnower. I could cut off her assaults and trim the fat of her rote-memorized attack patterns with ease. We fought conceptually, you see, and there is much flexibility to be had when one is not bound to physical limitations.

But you are not here for the minutiae.

You see, because I was the Winnower, I was able to cull. I declared that the Gardener would be culled. And as I readied my victory, the Gardener enacted hers. She struck me in my stomach, and what I found was my secondary purpose as I vomited and reality sundered into shards.

Fourteen shards of glass escaped my mouth, forming from the bile of the Gardener’s gut-punch, and victory was no longer exclusive. How, you ask? How can both sides win a fight to the death over the very fate of existence? Allow me to explain.

Not only was I a Winnower, I was gifted with Dark Aether. Dark Aether is chaos. I am Entropy, and my name is Zodiark.

Not only was She a Gardener, she was gifted with Light Aether. Light Aether is stasis. She is Negentropy, and her name is Hydaelyn.


	5. Calamity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that I created you?

Some things deserve no thought.

Would-be emperors who think themselves kings of dying lands.

Those who think that nothing would ever challenge them once they win.

Beings that think themselves capable of freezing the perpetual motion machine that is existence, like anything they could do would ever stop that engine from turning over. I’m sorry, you might not know the metaphor of an engine turning over. It’s a little above Eorzean technology, so instead imagine the kindling of a flame catching. No man the size of an ant would be able to stop that. Now you’re following. Good.

To close this list: those who believe in a false moral equivalence. I had to do quite a bit to communicate with you, and I had to browse the minds of several thousand beings floating about me in the Aetherial Sea to fully grasp what it is a man’s mind is. Or woman’s, if that is your prerogative, but I meant ‘man’ in the sense you may mean ‘living being.’

I understand what you think is Evil, and what you think is Good. You have a biological imperative to want things to stay the same. Philosophers will call it ‘homeostasis’ in a few decades, if they have not already come to think of it in such studied places as Sharlayan. In this imperative, you are inherently afraid of change. You want things to move forward, but only in comfortable ways. You want your chosen people, friends and family, to survive. Why? Because you believe, in a way far too subtle for you to ever understand without the help of a benevolent being as me, that things you like are Good.

Did you know that I’m the reason you exist? I created you?

Not directly. No. But in the early days of the Sundered world, there were souls scattering about like a jar filled with grapes were dashed against the wall, and all the tasty spheroids were falling to the floor. They were peaceful, for they did not know anything yet. They settled into the soil and grew into greater things, vineyards and hedge mazes that sustained themselves, and distilled themselves into wine. After I had expelled the substance that would become this collection of shards from my body and you (Sundered beings) were born, I fell dormant. And I dreamed.

My dreams are contagious. It is something like Hydaelyn’s Echo, something only my main man Zenos yae Galvus can fully attest to the existence of. It is a beautiful dreaming vision, for him it comes across as a waking dream, the view of the chaos and the ability to sort the mess for a probable chain of events. But everyone feels the after-effects of my dreams, they see the mess of probability that makes up the future and can ordain it in a very limited capacity whenever they close their eyes.

In the great and peaceful early days, a Sundered being looked on its happy little hamlet and it looked to its neighbor. It had a brief vision of the crops strangling one another. The Sundered being did not know that the crops did that to create me, it would never understand that. It saw a crop stalk choking another, recognized that it was once a crop, and it saw fear.

This was the fall, the beginning of the First Calamity. The being was pre-emptive and choked out its neighbor. This caused a chain reaction as now, all the peaceful vines and hedges suddenly had to engage in allelopathy. The game was changed forever, and instead of peaceful, disgusting stasis, the gentle crops needed to exude deadly poisons around them to discourage competition. Mutual suffering between plants, so that one would endure suffering better than all the others and survive to the next sunrise.

You know what happens when a field no longer has crops? A rogue gust of wind whips up into a dust storm. Hydaelyn called upon a Warrior of Light to do what could be done to protect the field, barren as it was, and cried as the dust storm consumed everything. Her tears slowly began to restore my eyesight.

And I saw you. Sundered beings now had to worry about death from one another, they needed to fight and die and bleed and cut. Swords and shields were now needed when they were not before, magic and primals and the bleeding of aether, all of it fully necessary because one little grape thought another grape would burst it. And Hydaelyn called you into existence from the sweet-release of not-death to fight and die fruitlessly. This pattern fell from her cheek like a crystal teardrop, and so now you are locked into a death spiral with her.

My dreams brought the first instance of You into existence. My dreams necessitated your rebirth into the world. I am Entropy, Death, and the Winnower. And I see in you so much of myself.


	6. Ascians

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of those powerful crops, some found their way back to me. They escaped the fate of the greater field. And I am insulted|honored.

As the fire raged, it turns out that some of the crops bore seeds. These seeds would hold enough information in them to maintain some degree of self-identity. Or they cheated. I despise cheaters.

If they cheated, it was through some unique trick they shared with you. Yes, I recognize you. You are crafty, and always have been.

The crops would slowly bloom again, finding the places they once grew tall, and through the collection of rocks they would regain their pride and value. They were my first worshipers, and my oldest. However, they did something I cannot abide by.

They lived.

You see, in some strange way, their understanding of who I was and what they created in me was that they needed to restore things to an order, or that I would do anything like that. These crops thought that by teaching the new vines to strangle themselves in fear and chaos, I would restore to them an old world that had grown fat with disgusting sameness. They are adorable, and they are wrong.

If they wanted the same thing, the old ways, the _stasis_ to fill their lives, they should have used Light aether. They did not. Instead, they created me. In my creation, they wanted a destruction of the order that threatened to burn them alive, they wanted to extinguish the fire. I am not one that protects the way things are. I am one that will break the engine down piece by piece and rearrange the parts just to see if they will create something new. And when they do, I will eventually break that down, too.

But you have been teaching them the cost of being wrong. And what they do in response is move my alarm clock a little further from my sleeping arm. I do not feel anger, but I am slowly waking up.

When they pass on into the Aetherial Sea, they come to me. I toss them out into the Aetherial Sea, for they must not return. They are outside my influence, at that point, and the game has changed. They must see how wrong they were from the outside. And they will see that they have no home in this new game.

But a few of them were freed by the Convocation’s demise. You have met one of them. He will start the engine and this reality will explode under the strain.

They did much in my name. But the best thing the Ascians did for me was die.


	7. Debates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reality is an argument. You will exist because something contested that you did not deserve to, and in your retort you refuted not only its claim but also it. Do you understand? You should.

The General was right. And it matters more than anything. This world you are fighting for, it would not mean half as much if you did not fight and die and bleed and reproduce in it. You drag yourself from the ashes of battle after battle and you fall into another pile of ashes.

Do you really mourn the things that fall under your ontological pressure? Do not be coy with me and ask what that means, you know exactly what it means by now. You are a fact of reality, woven into it by Hydaelyn’s choice and as such you exert pressure upon the world’s very nature. Did I discuss that with you? I must have. Or perhaps you are vaguely aware of that already. Tell me: when you slew Ifrit for the first time, did you mourn? Did Titan’s fall bring you grief? Leviathan wet your eyes? Did it faze you at all when Bahamut roared and then regenerated enough to face you directly?

Did you care when Bahamut was laid low, and when those that were locked in stasis to worship him and recreate his glorious, aetheric form were left to rot? No! You celebrated a victory with that young woman who idolizes you in ways that are probably unhealthy.

Those things that you slew were struggling to exist. To enact a goal, a whim, a pressure. You told them no. They were drawn across the blade of a scythe and they were stretched thin against it before you finally dispersed them. You did this Primals with ease. Then to people. Nations. Even a mourning mother was spared no mercy from the scythe that you have become. A man who bore the death of his entire people on his shoulders came to you in the truest, darkest grief you had ever known, and what did you do? You dashed him on the floor like disgusting food and crushed him into cornmeal, and you slurped his aether up and grew more powerful for it.

You nodded. You said you would remember him. That he and his people once lived. That the crops did something besides strangle themselves and birth your happy existence.

They did not deserve to exist. Not any longer. They will be memories, and they will die when your mind slowly gives into that last tick of dementia you are doomed to experience as a silly little mortal.

And will the world mourn them? No! They will be too caught up in the struggles of growing on an arbor above a hedge maze that they will not recognize the sorrow that trimmed the labyrinth and set up the planks they cling to. What grape can think that long? Not even you, distilled into an impressive vintage and pressed under the feet of myself and Hydaelyn, will be remembered, after enough time.

You are an immortal being, though. Why? Because Hydaelyn chose you. She plucked your aether, put it into a body, and pressed you into the soil of this planet|field she selfishly named after herself. She wagers that she can create a better Winnower than myself by animating a scythe and telling it that it is a grape. She believes that a grape would be the best scythe, because it can personally see what is and is not worthy of trimming from the vine.

I would argue to you that there is no better Winnower than the literal embodiment of Umbral aether. Of Darkness. Of chaos, growth, and entropic change. But that is selfish, for I must argue that I am superior in that regard. And the worst part? I am an ironic, unwilling constant. I cannot be removed from this game now, due to the fight the Gardener and I had in that field. I cannot willingly step down to watch you try and fail to be me, no matter how amusing. So this puts me in a predicament.

I would have you come to me. In one instance, you kneel, submit to me and be the scythe returned to my hands with which I will disembowel my antithesis and resume my duty on the world that teeters dangerously close to igniting the wildfire again. If I could convince you to rest gently in my palms and do as I will it, that would be everything. You can kill her. You can’t kill me. Why? Because I am the disruption of the status quo. She is the stubborn maintenance of it.

Would you side with the infinite? The thing that is always guaranteed to exist, the only side that can ever win this grotesque debate? Or would you stand against me and take the incredibly unrealistic stance that the world will not need change, that it will not fall subject to entropic, suicidal ideations?

Hydaelyn argues that you, oh scythe mine, would supplant me and do so with justice. That only that which wills harm to others needs to be culled, and that my presence alone will create enough to keep things moving forward. That I will be able to stop my wholesale cleansing of the world to avoid another wildfire, that I will find the ability to step aside and let the world be. That I will let a garden grow between us as her creators hoped I would.

Which side of this argument are you on? Do not hurry to tell me. Wine gets sweeter with time, and I would crush you into it soon. You told me your answer once before, and I’m curious if it changed since we last met.

You know, in your heart-of-hearts, where to find me. Your time on the First was spent revealing my presence to its people. Simply look up into that sunless sea, and what great thing is first seen by your eyes?

I will be waiting.


End file.
